Because when you put a sign up next to a freeway, people will read it until somebody takes it down.

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Monday, November 05, 2007

Freewayblogcalypse Now

These pictures came to me from Freewayblogger High Command. Apparently one of our operatives had gone over the high side and they wanted me to take him down. He went by the name "Kurtz", and his methods, they said, had become unsound.

I remembered Kurtz. At first he was one of our best freewaybloggers, covering the east coast from DC to Boston with "Impeach Bush Now." signs. By constantly moving, changing fonts, sizes and placement strategies, he managed to make the entire eastern seaboard look like a flourishing Democracy.

After awhile though his work became more bizarre...

I started my search on the web, going to various progressive organizations, message boards and newsgroups asking if anyone had seen him. The next day I had over 47,000 messages in my inbox, but no mention of Kurtz.

I flew out to Washington DC. A peace group was holding a demonstration/crafts fair down at the tidal basin, and the air was thick with smoke and the maddening clamor of windchimes. Within minutes my pockets were so full of pamphlets and flyers I could barely move. "Smell that?" a man said next to me, "That's incense. I love the smell of incense in the morning..."

I showed him the pictures and asked if he knew about any rogue signposters in the area. Looking them over he began to nod: "Yeah, this guy's still around. He ain't on the freeways though..." He turned and pointed out towards the Potomac, "He's gone upriver..."

I walked down to the tidal basin, rented a paddleboat and started up the Potomac...He was here alright.As I passed by one particularly heavily guarded compound, Dennis Hopper ran out on the dock and started screaming gibberish at me: I knew I'd found the right place.

"I'm here to talk to Kurtz."

"Oh man - you don't talk to Kurtz, you listen to him! The man's enlarged my mind. He's a Poet-Warrior in the classic sense... he'srewriting the book on retirement..."

At the foot of the dock an old man lay groaning in some bushes.

"Okay, okay..." Hopper said, "Sometimes he shoots people in the face... but hey, did you know "merit" is the middle word in "Ameritrade?"

Guards brought me up to a dark, candlelit room where Vice President Cheney, dressed in robes, sat in a corner dribbling water onto his head. "I've seen horror..." he began.

"Listen Asshole..." I said, "I don't know how you do things in Washington, but at Freewayblogger.com we have some goddam standards, and one of them is you don't put up signs calling the President a cunt."

"Go Fuck Yourself..." he continued, "It's Free Speech...

You pussy-ass liberals think you hate George Bush? Well then how the fuck do you think I feel, huh?" Rivulets of water ran down from his thumb and forefinger as he held them up, "I was this close... this fucking close... to ruling the whole goddam world... but no, I had to be the power behind the throne of Bozo-the-Fucking-Clown..."

I sat and stared at the Vice President as he mumbled to himself in the gloom, obviously insane.

"We drop fire from airplanes on entire countries - we tell the whole goddam world that the President of the United States screwed a chick with a cigar... but when I write 'fuck' on one of my signs you call it an obscenity!"

Everybody wanted him dead, him most of all. But that's not how we do things at Freewayblogger. I got up and left him there muttering, "The horror... the horror..."

While looking at your post Cake's "Comfort Eagle" started playing on Radio Paradise...with the repeating lyric "we are building a religion" bouncing in my brain like trans-national tumbleweeds across Highway America.